Dr Dan Whalen presents “The Origin of the First Supermassive Black Holes in the Universe” for the Winchester Cafe Scientiqiue

Most massive galaxies in the universe today harbor supermassive black holes (SMBHs), with masses from a few million to tens of billions of solar masses. But very bright quasars powered by billion solar mass BHs have now been discovered at redshift z ~ 7, or just 775 million years after the Big Bang. They pose serious challenges to current theories of cosmological structure formation because it is not known how BHs this massive appeared by such early epochs. I will discuss the possible origins of the first quasars and present new supercomputer simulations of how they could form in the first billion years of the universe.

Laura Holland presents “Rosalind Franklin – DNA and beyond”

The Rosalind Franklin Institute is a new national institute, devoted to developing innovative technology to solve some of the biggest challenges in life science. Many of our challenges relate to our ability to see the structures of life more clearly; from novel imaging techniques which will allow us to see better into living systems, to the atomic detail of a drug binding with a target protein. This ability to visualise the inner workings of life, and to draw new understanding from this, is one of the reasons we are named in honour of Rosalind Franklin. A great experimental scientist, Franklin worked on a number of diverse scientific problems, most famously DNA, bringing incredible experimental skill, technological expertise and knowledge from across the sciences. The Institute’s Director of Communications will discuss how the life of Rosalind Franklin, and her diverse work – beyond the discovery for which she is best known, has inspired this new Institute.

Laura Holland is a biologist by background, and has worked in science communication and events management for over a decade, most recently at Diamond Light Source. She is now Director of Communications at the Rosalind Franklin Institute, and is thoroughly enjoying combining her loves of life science, technology, and talking about incredible women in science

Dr Rachel Newton presents “Help! My equation has no solution!”

Details to follow

Rachel Newton is a lecturer in pure mathematics at the University of Reading. Her research focuses on rational solutions to polynomial equations, and reasons why these sometimes don’t exist. She studied undergraduate mathematics at Warwick and then went on to do her master’s and PhD at Cambridge. She held postdoctoral positions at Universiteit Leiden (the Netherlands), MPIM (Germany) and IHES (France), before moving to Reading in 2016.

Ying Zhou presents “Inspiring women who changed the world of AI”

It seems that every day we hear how AI is impacting people’s life across the world. Whether it’s the assistant in your smart speaker, self-driving cars, or assisting doctors to diagnose complex medical conditions. This is a journey full of adventure and opportunities. In this talk I would like to introduce you to the typical problems faced by the AI industry and the female pioneers who have helped pave the way in this fourth industrial revolution.

Ying is a hands-on business focused technology leader passionate about AI and big data. She is head of the AI Applications platform in Oracle and works with the Senior leadership team to develop the vision and strategy for Oracle’s AI platform. She is responsible for leading multiple teams in delivering high performance AI platform. Before Oracle, Ying has worked in both financial and telecom sectors to transform legacy systems with modern big data architecture.